I (finally) got my paws on a copy of Cory’s new novel Eastern Standard Tribe at his reading on Thursday. Personally autographed, even: “For Joey — In circadian solidarity!”
(We agree on many things, but circadian rhythm is not one of them. Cory
likes to start his day insanely early, while I prefer to end mine
insanely late. His upcoming move to the GMT zone may actually put us in
sync.)
I read it in two bursts: from the start to the point where the
protagonist explains tribes to his incredulous group therapy-mates
yesterday, and this morning, I read from that point straight through
the end. There’s a certain casual but insistent forward flow to his
writing that makes you want to keep reading. It’s rather like the
motion of a Haunted Mansion Doombuggy: it shows you something cool, but
its wiggle tells you that something cooler is waiting just over there
in the next chamber.
One thing I enjoyed about the book was the way it was peppered with
little bits of OpenCola cultural folderol:
- Quirky
coworker/friends: argumentative personalities, smooth-talking biz-dev
guys and anal-rententive user experience orthos so real that you want
to pimp-slap them with a hardcover edition of Tufte.
- The
wireless
Napster on the Massachusetts Turnpike in the novel is a refinement of
ideas that Cory would bounce at us during our runs to Fry’s when we
both lived in Bay Area (“Impulse-shopper aisle, Joey! Beef jerky plus
porn equals-equals good!”). We talked about how a peer-to-peer network
of WiFi nodes in cars could be used to report traffic conditions and
provide drivers with optimal routes.
- The instant-messaging nicknames: “opencolon” and “ballgravy”.
“Opencolan” was the company’s joke name for its employees. We’d started
using the phrase “that eats serious ball chowder” after stumbling into
it on a message board where the Icy Hot Stuntaz were getting dissed.
- San Franscarcity: Cory’s pet name for Baghdad-by-the-bay. I called the satellite office we shared “Deep Space Nine”
because it shared certain qualities with the ficitious space station:
far from the central organization, a visiting place for strange aliens,
and bad acting.
- The phrase “midget wrestling”. One project we worked on,
Colavision, was a personal broadcasting tool, and we always suggested,
even to the most stoned-faced no-apparent-sense-of-humour
investors, that “backyard midget wrestling” was one of the things
that people wanted to broadcast. I think the midget wrestling thing was
an obsession of John Henson’s (not the guy with the TV show, but our friend and coworker).
Of course, I can’t imagine a writer not throwing in little bits of
his or her own experience to give some meat to a novel. They make the
story feel more “real”. It’s especially cool when you’ve worked,
played, double-dated and gone to Disneyland and even watched Dude, Where’s My Car? (and in the theatre, no less!) with the author; it makes those bits feel like little secret high-fives.
I was about two-thirds of the way through the book when the feeling of deja vu
hit its peak, and then it dawned on me. A clever idea to make a cool
tech product? Everything going smoothly until the double-cross? The
idea’s originators being run out of the deal and dicredited and screwed
over by the suits? This was OpenCola. This was life, from late 1999
through to early 2002.
Keep in mind that this is Yours Truly’s interpretation of the book. I
have no special inside knowledge: I never saw any notes for the book,
nor do I have direct access to the part of his brain that he will
eventually stick a Creative Commons badge on, once we get wetware technology.
It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it.
